ilovecode

About six weeks ago I purchased a TomTom GO 910 GPS. Most people over here in Belgium seem to have GPSs , but I have fought off buying one for a couple of reasons:

1. Lack of money to put towards a GPS.
2. I wanted to learn my way around. When I talked to people here I would reference a place and they had no clue where it was, even though they had been there 10 times because they simply did what the GPS told them and never bothered to really get situated with the area themselves. I wanted to make sure I knew how to get around here.

So what prompted me to buy one? Well, there are a few things really. In the part of the country I live in, it is only required that a street sign be posted once on the street and it is usually on the side of someone’s house. So the street could be 5 miles along, with 10 intersections and as long as a street sign is somewhere on the street; then that is fine…according to them! It makes it very hard to figure out what street you are on and when you are following directions and looking for a streetname.. it is a major PITA.

After months and months of research and comparison shopping (yes I’m THAT person), I decided the time had come to buy one. I wanted to start taking road trips around Europe and make the most of my time here as it is limited! The nice thing about the 910 is it is preloaded with maps of the US and Europe. So when we do go back to the states, we can actually use it. My only experience with GPS systems is one of the Garmin eTrex handhelds for backwoods hiking and camping. So seeing this thing was pretty cool. It mounts on my windshield with a suction cup that so far seems to work fine. What’s really cool about it is it has a 20 GB hard drive and 12gb is dedicated to MOI! I usually take my iPod nano in my car with an FM Transmitter. So now I have 12 GB to work with. Excellent. I can even movies or pictures on it if I want; although that would be a little bit distracting. I have no loaded it up with my favorite tunes yet as I don’t have an FM transmitter for it. it comes with a wire that I can apparently plug into my car’s audio system somewhere, but after 5 minutes of looking I gave up. I decided to just buy the mount with an FM transmitter built in.

I got to try it out last week when I flew to Austria. When we landed in Salzburg we rented a car and headed into the bavarian alps. Alot of the roads are very small backroad mountain roads and it was good at identifying those and letting us avoid them if we wanted to…we didn’t! Those are usually the roads with the best views. I’m very happy with the GPS so far. It talks to me and tells me where to go. I can even choose if I want to hear a man’s voice or a woman’s voice. I’ve always enjoyed the sound of british accents so i am listening to Simon from the UK tell me what to do. It could get interesting

When I get bored with Simon, I can change to Kate just to change things up! I may just go french and choose Bernard or Juliette. That will show me if my French lessons are paying off or not. If I feel like I’m letting the word “dude” slip from my casual vocabulary too much, I can download Bodie..dude.

All in all, i like it. I can’t wait to get my music on it and see how that goes.

UPDATE - People extracting with Winzip have been running into errors. Try winrar if you do.

What a long process this has been but the day is finally here. Let’s back up a bit and start from the beginning, shall we?

Many many many months ago I decided I didn’t want the typical “About me” page. Sure that way I could dictate what people knew about me and frame their perception of me, but what fun is that . I came across a script by a very nice guy, Dean who offered to give me his script! This was awesome. Dean’s script had the functionality I needed, but I wanted more functionality and wanted to put a database behind it rather than rely on files. I spent about 20 hours and wound up with a pretty neat script and launched it about 16 months ago.

It is pretty neat and i think it gives readers an interesting perspective into my personality that they wouldn’t see in my posts. Over the months though, I continuously had people asking me for a copy of it. I decided I should make it a plugin because i didn’t know of any like it out there. I finally did. My good friend Jelena wanted to start her blog last month and she wanted a copy too. All according to my evil plan, i talked her into helping me finish it. I remember when I told her the functionality I had left to do on it and she said.. oh 2-3 hours tops. We’ve spent well over 80 hours since then and finally have something that is hopefully worth to put out. That probably seems likes an astronomical amount of time but it really is a PITA to make it work just by dragging and dropping a file into your plugin directory. I have a new found respect for plugin authors. My last plugin was a breeze to make but the functionality was also very limited and didn’t require any interaction with the admin panel.

There is one big issue with it and hopefully you can help me figure it out. Upon activation, the plugin creates a page called “Ask Me”. Everything works as it should if you already have a page created. If you don’t however and you try to view your page at: http://www.yourblog.com/ask-me/ or http://www.yoursite.com/blog/ask-me/, you can’t find it. So what you have to do is create a test page and then delete the page and all is well.

I’m pretty sure the reason for this is when wordpress creates a page, it inserts the page into a specific table, but it also turns on a flag saying, “hey, we have pages!” I can’t figure out where that flag is, so if anyone knows, please let me know!

If you have Wordpress, and want a page like my Ask me page, you can download the plugin. For those of you who don’t read the ‘read me’… please do so. Report any bugs here!

I just StumbledUpon this cool site called Don’t Click It.

This site is just really neat because you can’t click in it. It doesn’t sound as exciting as it is, but give it a shot. I kept wanting to click and i felt almost nauseous not being able to. It went against every instinct in my body. But, i did it and I survived.

It’s just cool and I wanted to share it.

I logged into my online banking today to order some deposit envelopes and to get their mailing address because I have a check I want to deposit. Well, on my screen it says:

Deposit@Home

It’s a new, innovative and FREE way to make deposits from your home or office. Now you can make immediate deposits by using your PC and scanner.

Of course I am intrigued, so I click to read further. Here are the steps I need to take:

• Enter the amount of the check and select the account to receive the deposit.
• Endorse your check with “For deposit only to USAA FSB account number [your account number].” Then follow the prompts to scan the front and back in two easy steps.

And then deposit received by a certain time are available the next business day?!?!

How cool is that. Yet another example of how technology is so cool. Now I don’t have to wait 10 days to mail my USD check back to m bank in the states. Convenience is a wonderful thing!

Dusty Wilson just released this neat little add-on to Firefox if you are a Sirius satellite subscriber: Sirius Player.

This is a really good first effort that lets you listen to Sirius in your main browser rather than in an external window. Right now though, I don’t know how often I will use it. I do listen to Sirius quite often, but I find myself listening to it in IE rather than FireFox because FF does not render the artist name or song title that is currently playing. The Firefox add-on is missing that also. This functionality is important to me because one of the reasons I listen to Sirius is to find new music so I like to know who and what I’m listening to.

It was a great idea and hopefully Dusty gets a lot of support for this. I’ll definitely be watching the progress of this one.